Considering the popularity of Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica in the Middle Ages and its resounding success as a textbook for teaching the Bible according to its literal sense, it is surprising that the academic world has been waiting so long for a comprehensive monograph on this twelfth-century work. Mark Clark's book fills this void, and will probably be foundational in the field for many years to come. His biographical introduction to Peter Comestor's work places the Parisian exegete in the tradition of literal exegesis that started with Hugh of Saint Victor, which emphasized a literal/historical understanding of the biblical text (historia) as the basis of theological insight, as opposed to its allegorical and moral interpretation (allegoria and moralia, respectively). But, whereas in Hugh's time, the term historia could still refer ambiguously to either the literal exposition of the text or its historical sense (while Hugh himself took it to mean the latter, Hugh's student, Andrew of Saint Victor, emphasized the former), Clark shows how Peter Comestor combined both, not only presenting the reader with a literal exegesis of each passage, but also rendering the biblical text into an historically and doctrinally consistent narrative. This probably explains why his work became a foundational text for medieval instruction in biblical literacy, and its author earned the sobriquet “the Master of Histories.”

Clark spends a good part of his book analyzing Comestor's exegetical technique, using the Historia Scholastica on the Gospels and Genesis as sources. For the Gospels, Clark shows that Comestor was lecturing not so much on the plain biblical text as on the Glossa ordinaria on the Gospels. He points out that the Master, in writing the Historia, managed to overcome some of the difficulties in formatting and presentation that were inherent in the Glossa, which hitherto had been the common textbook for biblical instruction. In his analysis of the Historia on Genesis, Clark convincingly shows that Comestor's work was conceived, from the beginning, as a book for the classroom, in which scriptural lemmas, biblical paraphrase, glossing, and commentary were artfully interwoven.

Clark perhaps overstates the academic neglect of Comestor's work (his statement that “scholars have not followed up on [Smalley's] insights into the connection between the success of the History and the Victorine program,” (23) seems patently false), and the autobiographical style of the first chapter is slightly off-putting. But he is right to point out that the lack of a good edition of the Historia may have played a role in obscuring our understanding of the exact place of Comestor's work in the scholarly word of the late twelfth century. Preparing such an edition is made difficult not only by the sheer quantity of manuscripts (the recent editor of the Historia on Genesis, Agneta Sylwan, identified some eight-hundred manuscripts of this text alone!), but also, according to Clark, by a number of false assumptions about the early genesis of this text, which renders Sylwan's edition deficient in his eyes. Clark's study sheds light on the mysterious extraneous “notes,” which J. P. Migne's edition published as “additions,” and which Sylwan's edition placed within brackets. Clark convincingly shows that these notes were not later additions to the Historia. Rather, they were part of the original design of this highly flexible text right from the beginning. This shows that the Historia was conceived as a school text right from its inception, and that it found its origin in Comestor's activity as a teacher; it was not, as has generally been supposed, a compilation of his scholarly insights created during his comfortable retirement behind the walls of the Abbey of Saint Victor. Convincing evidence for such a retirement is entirely lacking anyway, according to Clark.

The most path-breaking part of this monograph is no doubt Clark's last two chapters on Stephen Langton. Not only does he show convincingly that Langton was one of Comestor's students (which requires some reinterpretation of the dates of Langton's life), he also argues that Langton played an active role in the redaction of the Historia scholastica, and was one its earliest users as a teacher. This not only sheds new light on the early dispersion of the Historia as a textbook, but also makes Langton's lecture notes an important textual witness of the early stages of the Historia. Clark gives some suggestions as to what a new edition might look like, and in the appendices to this book provides a few samples. Hopefully in due time we can look forward to seeing this edition appear in print.

Mark Clark's book fills an important lacuna in the study of late twelfth-century biblical exegesis, and it will no doubt stimulate further research. It is a well-researched study that furthers our understanding of twelfth-century exegesis in significant ways.